Tune In Or Tune Out: Be Prepared To Roll With The Punches With ‘The Changeling’
The Changeling takes on the daunting task of turning New York into a modern-day fairytale. Based on the eponymous novel by Victor LaValle, the Apple TV+ series follows Apollo (LaKeith Stanfield) as he searches for his missing wife Emma (Clark Backo); Emma is convinced their baby is a changeling — a living replica left behind by supernatural beings who took their real child. The show is narrated by LaValle and partially framed by a children’s book Apollo’s father read to him, To the Waters and the Wild, which describes fairies stealing babies. The Changeling starts on strong footing with a superb cast and an enticing premise. The blend of fairytales and seedy urbanity, past and present, and nightmares and reality creates a creepily disorienting atmosphere. However, the sheer ambition of the series is confined by its mere eight episodes, forcing the audience to take a few of the creative decisions in stride.
Meet Apollo and Emma
The cast carries The Changeling, examining childhood and parental trauma through a lens of supernatural horror. Stanfield and Backo subtly exhibit the pervasive exhaustion of being new parents and fluidly slip into a madness beyond standard parenthood. They become frighteningly intense at the drop of a hat, playing real-world emotion and horror elements off each other. Adina Porter (American Horror Story) steals the spotlight as Apollo’s mother Lilian, delivering a nuanced portrayal of a lifetime of tough choices and regrets as a single mother.
Building on their performances, the show is truly unsettling. Early in the season, Emma receives photos of Apollo and their baby that Apollo didn’t take, and which quickly disappear from her phone. Shots from strange angles give the sense that some entity watches our protagonists. An eerie score composed by Dan Deacon (Hustle) and motifs of screaming kettles, loud knocking, and slow, anticipatory tracking shots toward doors make the ordinary frightening and suspenseful.
The Changeling keeps the viewer on the edge of their seat with a slow tease of information. An unassuming man named William Wheeler (Samuel T. Herring) tags along on Apollo’s journey and becomes progressively more cryptic; every piece of information he shares about himself gets questioned, proven wrong, and revised until a final, frightening picture arises. Even a strange image of Lilian standing by the river holding a bright red suitcase brings up countless questions and keeps the viewer coming back for answers.
The Changeling is not just creepy and enigmatic for the sake of it; instead, it is a fairytale in the original sense, making supernatural lessons out of real-life issues. The show explores postpartum depression, intergenerational trauma, the unknowable consequences of impossible decisions as a parent, how women are often not believed, what it means to be a parent — the all-consuming, even burdensome love for their child and the lengths they will go to protect them. LaValle narrates the series, and while his documentary-like voice may not be for everyone, it makes the show feel like an oral narrative, a story, without overdoing it.
Was it Tune In or Tune Out?
In order to highlight themes of intergenerational trauma and the fractured mental state of the characters, the show jumps a lot between different time periods and throws doubt on what is real. The first episode alone switches between a time when Apollo and Emma are apart, the near past where they are together, the far past of Apollo’s parents’ youth, and Apollo’s nightmares of his father, which may or may not be memories. This intercutting threads common themes in each character’s life together and is disorienting in a fascinating, atmospheric way. However, if you want literal answers, you may not always get them.
While the blurred line between ordinary and supernatural is intriguing, the world’s tone and rules are a bit incohesive. The fairytale action is kicked off by an enigmatic washer woman in Brazil (Teca Pereira) — complete with a wild stare of different colored eyes — who ties a mystical string around Emma’s wrist; she tells Emma that if it is ever cut, whatever Emma wishes for will come true, but that she must be careful what she wishes for. This witch-like imagery is very different from the island of “witches” that is later introduced; led by Jane Kaczmarek (Malcolm in the Middle), who gives a relatively straight performance, these witches feel more like a commune from a dystopian YA show. The creepy stalker pictures Emma receives of Apollo and the baby seem to come from an otherworldly source as they disappear at the exact wrong moment. However, it is implied later — though never explicitly revealed — that they are from a network of hackers. Still unsettling, and incorporating a truly frightening aspect of our modern reality, this prospect adopts more of a conspiracy thriller tone than a fairytale. One of the greatest requests for a suspension of disbelief comes with the introduction of bona fide mole people living under the subways of New York. Instead of making them ancient or magical, they are quite simply a commune of people who left the city to live underground; compared to the magic of the string or the idea that fairies live among us and steal babies, the mole people miss the mark of blending the fantastical with the real.
The pacing is similarly a bit choppy. The first two episodes take their time revealing the protagonists’ childhood traumas and create an unsettling vibe with the strange pictures and nightmares. Episode three jumps to (SPOILERS) Emma chaining up Apollo and walking disjointedly like she’s possessed. The show never becomes so slow that the viewer wonders where it is going — by episode six, Emma has a solid lead on where her real baby is — but by the 29-minute finale there are still questions with glossed over answers.
Episode seven completely breaks from the main action, but truly steals the show in the process. The penultimate episode centers Lilian as she records an explanation of her choices as a single mother for Apollo. Porter’s monologuing combined with a theatrical aesthetic — spotlights, walls sliding out, and a focus on dialogue — creates an intimate space for the audience to sit inside Lilian’s mind. The episode takes place in a version of Elk’s Hotel that exists outside of time, with present-day Lilian speaking from the 1970s. It is part memory and part Lilian’s struggle with her past. As Lilian contemplates how to reveal her secret to Apollo, just enough morsels keep viewers hungry for more. Encounters with AIDS, abusive relationships, and working single motherhood ground the heady representation of Lilian’s struggle to confess with genuine emotion. It is somewhat confusing what present-day Lilian is actually doing, especially when she encounters her 1970s self (Alexis Louder), but the beauty of the acting and staging are enough motivation to roll with it.
The finale shifts jarringly back to the primary action, but a stylistic recap of the season intercuts all the clues in a logical order, rebuilding the hype around the main mystery. The episode ends with LaValle reading through the entirety of To the Waters and the Wild (the whole thing being a short poem) as an exciting lead up to final moments; against his narration, Apollo and Emma reach critical points on their respective journeys to reunite their family. The very end (SPOILERS) is a disconnected tease of an underground, child-stealing network and a huge monster eye. While this final scene was probably unnecessary, there are plenty of questions left to power a second season.
Who will like it?
The Changeling does not perfectly execute its lofty goals. It seeks to turn New York into a dark, adult fairytale, making lessons of the real world’s dangers. Simultaneously, it aims to disorient, tantalize, and frighten its viewers while also exploring heartfelt themes of family and parenthood. However, it falters in its incohesive picture of a secret, fantastical New York, as well as in its struggle to maintain a steady pace of questions and answers. A lot is left for the audience to ponder, not just for the purpose of provoking future thought, but because the show lacked time to clearly delve into everything. However, The Changeling features a truly unsettling atmosphere, exploration of genuine themes, beautiful acting, an intriguing, if imperfectly formed, world, and enough questions left to warrant a second season. If you’re willing to suspend some disbelief and roll with interesting, if flawed, attempts at a unique, creepy, adult fairytale, give The Changeling a chance. All eight episodes of the first season can be streamed on Apple TV+ now.
